work. life. open source. diatribes.

Yesterday, I helped organize a Eclipse DemoCamp in Austin. Freescale Semiconductor graciously offered some space to host the event so we’re thankful to them for doing so! We had a wide variety of talks! Our first demo was given by Tom Hochstein from Freescale and he showcased some of Freescale’s Eclipse-based tools:

The focus of the demo was on multi-core debugging. It was interesting to see how Freescale integrated with the Eclipse debug framework to enable multi-core debugging. There’s more work to be done though as there’s some challenges in displaying a bunch of cores and having a developer deal with them in a meaningful way. There was also talk about some potential contributions from Wind River in this space, but I’m not sure. In the end, I’m positive we’ll see more of this trend in the embedded space where Eclipse tools will be used to empower multi-core related development.

After Tom, I demoed some plug-in development enhancements that are available in Ganymede and some that are coming with the Galileo release. It seems everyone loves the Plug-in Spy and that I need to focus on enabling the spying of menu contributions in 3.5… maybe on the plane trip to Eclipse Summit Europe. After I was done, Tom Watson from IBM talked about some of the new things coming in OSGi r4.2:

Tom talked about cool things like Distributed OSGi, bundle trackers, nested frameworks. One thing that scares me about the r4.2 specification is the talk about nested frameworks. I don’t understand the need to have a parent-child relationship with frameworks. It seems like an added level of complexity to achieve something that is already possible within OSGi. It smells of JEE isolation. But hey, I’m willing to listen to hear what people think about the benefits of this is versus the added complexity. We have to remember one of the reasons OSGi is so attractive is due to the simplicity…

After Tom, we heard James Ervin talk about Groovy Monkey. Groovy Monkey is a cool little utility if you’re looking at scripting within the Eclipse platform. People would be happy to know that I bugged James about moving Groovy Monkey to Eclipse and he claims he’s working on it. Feel free to pester him if you want him to move it to Eclipse.org 😉

After James, we had Donald Smith from the Eclipse Foundation talk about what Eclipse really is. Donald busted out the colored markers and explained what Eclipse is:

In retrospect, this should have been the first talk, but Donald was a bit grumpy after getting in really late the night before. There are still a lot of people out there that don’t have a good idea of what “Eclipse” really is and we haven’t done a good job in explaining it. My favorite explanation of what Eclipse is involved people thinking that think Mike Milinkovich is some demi-god developer that wields and controls 1000 committers at Eclipse. Yap, that’s how it works 😉

On the whole, thanks to everyone who came! I promise next time that there will be frosty beverages!